Hospital staff thought man's injury was some sort of stunt at first

Ho Lung sits calmly in a hospital examination room with a 10 INCH knife buried in his skull.

The injured man cheated death after a prank with friends went horribly wrong and he ended up with the fruit knife embedded in his brain.

Following the mishap he walked into his local A&E at Yanji in Jilin province in northeast China and told shocked staff: "I'd like to see a doctor please."

He was so calm that medics said the receptionist was at first not sure if it was some sort of stunt and it was only when the man leaned down for her to have a closer look that she really realised he had been given a potentially life-threatening injury.

An emergency x-ray showed that the knife blade penetrated through his skull and into his brain but had missed his main blood vessels.

This allowed doctors during a three-hour operation to remove the blade without apparently causing any significant damage.

After the man was bandaged he even asked if he could go home.

Asked how the knife had ended up in his head he declined to give details to doctors, saying: "It's like this, I was playing a silly game my friend and it went wrong and I ended up with a knife in the head. It was just a silly mistake and it could have happened to anybody."

In the end doctors agreed to allow the man to discharge himself and he left together with the fruit knife after his wound had been bandaged, and after he told medics he promised to come back for a check-up.